The Executioner's Song (108 page)

                God ain't it crazy? Aint it so fuckin crazy.

                i'm furious with the ways an wiles of Love Life and the Ultimate Wisdom, furious with God. And furious with myself for not being patient and doing things right the first time with jack an jill.

                Love to have that pretty white bird sitting here on my night stand. You remember that i spoke or wrote to you once of my childhood daydream of being through with this senseless life and being born once again but if the choice be mine it was to be born into the wings of a small white bird. And still would i choose the same if i could.

Christmas Eve

Dec. 24

Long days waiting

For your Love again

Long nights restless

Scattered thots

Wondering whats become

Of all our chances.

                Nicole

Dec. 25

it is not really a `fear jest such a great sadness to think of the uncertainty of days ahead.

                Nicole

DESERET NEWS

No Move for Nicole

Provo, Christmas Day—Nicole Barrett has been ordered committed indefinitely to the Utah State Hospital in Provo.

                Fourth District Judge David Sam ruled that the mother of two young children should stay in the mental hospital . . .

                Meanwhile, a turkey dinner with all the trimmings was the highlight of Christmas Day at Utah State Prison where Gilmore is in isolation for disciplinary reasons.

                Gilmore was not allowed to receive any presents and today was a non-visiting day, so he had no visitors a prison spokesman said.

Sterling Baker's wife, Ruth Ann, wrote a letter.

                Dear Gary, I was thinking about you and how you are going to be alone on Xmas. I wish I could be up there with you. I really love you a lot. I hope in the next world we can meat, and be able to know each other well. But please don't try to hurry it. I don't want you to die.

Usually the Damico family would have a big Christmas party. One year they would get together at Brenda's house, next year at Toni's, then Ida's. This season, being no joy for it, they met at Toni's to exchange gifts, said a prayer for Gary, had a cup of coffee, went back to their separate places.

Mikal came over to the trailer on Christmas Day but Bessie's mind was on other times. She remembered one Christmas when Gary was not in Reform School and was watching his baby brother unwrap the gifts. She had tended to spoil Mikal in those days. It had taken her half the night to wrap his presents, but in the morning Mikal kept saying, "This is an awful day. I've got so many things I don't want." Gary kept laughing.

Gaylen, on the other hand, came home one afternoon that year just before the holidays and said one of the Sisters told them how there was no Santa Claus. He was very upset. Bessie said, "Gaylen, there's only the spirit of giving. That exists. You've had the good heart to believe in Santa Claus longer than anybody else."

                Then her thoughts came back to the trailer. These days all thoughts returned to the trailer. Her heart turned over, as if a great wheel had revolved. She felt a tear drop, pure as sorrow itself.

GILMORE            What is Christmas? These holidays in jail are a bummer. You don't get any mail. The routine is disrupted, the day just seems slower. They act like they're really doing something by giving you a big meal, but it ain't like the menu in the paper. You don't get it good, you know. I don't like weekends in jail, but holidays I hate.

Shirley Pedler, Executive Director of the ACLU in Utah, had gotten her job right after college. She applied for the post, and there she was, Executive Director, with a general membership of a few hundred people. The funds to keep the office going came from membership dues, and a modest grant from the national office. Five or six Salt Lake attorneys volunteered their time on a regular basis, and as many as twenty might help once a year. It was small stuff and, right now, beleaguered. In Utah, belonging to the ACLU was like being a Bolshevik.

                Once the ACLU got into the Gilmore case, Shirley Pedler began to receive a lot of hate mail and crank calls. For more than a month they called her at work and at home, all day, all night. She knew it would continue until Gilmore was dead. She was living by herself, and sometimes after a long day, she would dread going home to hear the phone ringing. "Something bad's going to happen to you," a voice would intone. "I hope you get shot with Gilmore," the next caller would say. Sometimes the men were obscene. One remarked that since she was good looking and single, he was ready to do this and that to her.

                They usually hung up quickly. By now, these days, she was tending to flare up. Didn't hesitate to tell her callers off. Her nerves had never been well insulated, but with the loss of sleep and the loss of weight, she had nightmares about Mr. Gilmore. A man would kick a platform out from under him. As he hung in the air, they would release gas pellets. Some of the dreams were bloody.

Raised to be active in the Church, she was no longer a practicing Mormon. All the same, these callers were like people she had grown up with. She didn't feel betrayed so much as unable to believe what was going on. "The injustice in this case is so apparent," she would say to herself. At the Board of Pardons Hearing, she thought Chairman Latimer was totally inconsistent. "Why is there no public outcry?" she wanted to know. It had been a travesty, and in the middle was Gilmore, a terribly pale and quite attractive young man, Shirley Pedler thought. His fasting made him look ghastly, but unforgettable.

                He was so pale.

Afterward, she became personally self-conscious about the fact that this man's life, due to the maneuverings going on, was in very uncertain circumstances. He did not know his fate from day to day, and yet she was part of those maneuverings.

                So she wrote a letter to Gilmore. She told him that she regretted the discomfort that the ACLU was causing him and the terrible uncertainty.

                She wished she had the opportunity to talk to him directly, and explain what they were doing. She knew his life was being made more difficult by her. She wanted to tell him why she thought it had to be done. She wished they could cooperate, instead of finding themselves on different sides.

                She thought that if she could speak to Gary Gilmore, she would say that she was not personally out of sympathy with his wish to commit suicide. She could see how confronting life at Utah State Prison might warrant taking one's own life, and he had a right to decide whether he was going to live or die. But she did feel the State had no business participating. Capital punishment was not only wrong, but his execution would touch off others, for it would demystify the taking of life by the State. The real horror was people lining up to blow somebody away with a lack of passion, a methodical, calculated turning of the machinery of the State against the individual.

                Why come to terms with it? That was what she wanted to say.

As lawyers, Moody and Stanger were able to beat the no-visitor law, and they went to see Gary late on Christmas afternoon.

GILMORE            Shirley Pedler wrote me a personal letter. What does she look like anyway?

STANGER She's a slight, young woman, about thirty, not bad looking. I've never seen her in person. I've only seen her on TV. She wears a suit with pants.

GILMORE            I don't know what we can do to make the ACLU butt out. The Supreme Court said they're not gonna rehear it. What else can they do? Go to the United Nations? . . .

Shirley Pedler had Christmas dinner at her parents' house. They were pretty conservative people, and her father worked for the State, but never, until this meal, had they had a knock-down drag-out about capital punishment. Today, however, her brother started to attack her on the ACLU position, and Shirley had to defend it. Her brother kept saying, "What about the victims and the families?"

                It escalated. Shirley had been going in a different direction from her family anyway, but the discussion did ruin the dinner and she felt bad about that. None of them was able to get really comfortable after that.

GILMORE            Would you like to hear a poem?

STANGER            Sure.

GILMORE            I'll give you a little preamble to it. You know prisons are noisy places. And I talked about that guard blowing his nose for five minutes. And this morning he carried on a two-hour conversation, and I finally asked him to shut up. This poem is in the book that I wrote for Nicole. This is the preamble: I get irritable at the noise I have to listen to, toilets flushing, water pipes jarring, stupid conversations, screened conversation Now here's the poem:

                Dark thots of mayhem on a cold steel nite, when the little noises won't let you sleep.

                Dark thots of mayhem, murder and gore.

                A bore. Too few dark debts are ever paid.

                A fool down the way laughs at the loss of day, another sighs and another cries at the lies of their lives.

                Dark thots of mayhem murder and gore, too few dark debts are ever paid

                More owed.

I wrote that poem in '74 listening to noise I didn't want to hear. I like it quiet. I would love an absence of sound so profound I could hear my blood. I guess that's one of the things I've always hated worst about prison, the noise, listening to motherfuckers barf and cough, and listening to frustration. On the seventeenth of January I hope to hear my last harsh noise.

STANGER            Hum, it's a good poem.

Chapter 21

THE OCTAVE OF CHRISTMAS

Julie Jacoby had a good opinion of Shirley Pedler and thought her very attractive with that long thin build and her beautiful long hands.

                The strain of the Gilmore situation, however, was really making Shirley lose too much weight. She had been a pretty intense woman to begin with, but after these last weeks, she was beginning to resemble a cigarette.

                Although Shirley was twenty-four years younger, Julie Jacoby thought they were a lot alike. They would both rather be reclusive, yet were always in the middle of political activity. So Julie was not surprised when Shirley, during Christmas week, asked her to aid in the formation of the Utah Coalition Against the Death Penalty.

Of course Julie had not been doing a great deal in the year since she and her husband moved from Chicago to Utah. It was nothing like the Days of Rage in Chicago in the summer of 1968 when people were beaten by the police. That was when, in her own mind, she moved on from being little more than just another society lady from the North Shore who came down to United Charities twice a week to spend an afternoon sympathizing with the mothers of black children who came into the office in various states of coma from eating lead paint that had peeled off the walls. Some of those society ladies used to appear for work wearing diamond rings, and Julie had spent time trying to get the idea across that these ladies ought not to carry more wealth on their finger than the person in need across the desk could make in a year.

                Her husband was an executive and Julie would say that he seemed never to have recovered from a shock in the womb that left him a deep-dyed forever Republican. Julie, Phi Beta in medieval history from the University of Michigan, had gone to Chicago to seek her fortune, and found it in the good German fellow she married, for he rose in the ranks of his corporation while Julie brought up their children and became—her first clue to future shifts—a lapsed Episcopalian. She might have done no more than join the League of Women Voters, read the National Observer, the New York Review of Books and I. F. Stone, but the Days of Rage on Michigan Boulevard shook her to the roots. She felt radicalized. After Attica traumatized.

                She thought Rockefeller was shooting the fish in the barrel that day.

                She worked with the Alliance to End Repression.

                Then the company moved her husband to Utah. Out in Salt Lake, the ACLU was the only game in town. Julie wanted to start another Alliance to End Repression, but the energy was no longer there. Utah depressed her. She felt that she and her husband were living in a deteriorated relationship, and her young son, ripped from his native soil at the age of twelve, was not happy. It just about took Julie down. She became so occupied with her son's problems that she felt defanged on social issues.

                She thought she was in an extremely right-wing place. The Church and State were deeply entangled. Julie went to visit the opening of the Legislature and here was this trio of sour-faced old men sitting up front. They did the opening prayer. She was there that day to testify against capital punishment, and the chairman of the committee, a Mormon, said that as long as he had to listen to the Episcopalian point of view, he would like to read something to close the meeting, and opened a red-bound book and quoted Brigham Young.